Balint wandered slowly down the centre of the allée where the branches of the old trees had long since met to form a leafy vault. Over his head the foliage murmured as a light breeze touched the tops of the trees, though down below nothing moved and Balint was left undisturbed with his memories of childhood. How long the avenue had then seemed, especially when he had been given his first horse, a reliable old stallion called Gambia and had been allowed to canter the whole length on his own, free at last of the écuyer and the leading rein!
Today it was only a few moments before he reached the end of the planted line of trees where flowed a branch of the Aranyos river which had artificially been diverted below the mill-reach many years before. He went on until he found himself opposite a sizeable island called the Big Wood — Nagyberek — which had always held a special mystery and attraction for him, as it was a wild and untamed and exciting place quite different from the trim lawns, weeded paths and carefully pruned flowering hedges of the gardens that clustered round the castle terrace. Here he would wander for hours fancying himself an explorer in an undiscovered wilderness and here he would play at Cowboys and Indians all by himself — he, of course, was always an Indian — crawling invisibly on hands and knees in the waist-high hemlock, spying on bands of marauding braves or fleeing from his pursuers. Here he would climb a branch to ambush his chief enemy or shoot arrows at the hated paleface; just as he had read in the pages of James Fenimore Cooper.
Just to walk once again in this once so familiar spot brought all these old memories crowding back.
Crossing the great meadow, Balint went to find the thickets on the other side which bordered the meandering twists and turns of the river’s main stream and here and there grew in the swamps and bogs created each time the river flooded and over-flowed its banks.
The hundred-acre hay meadow was the farthest one could see from the castle terrace before the dense plantations of trees closed the open vista with a mass of impenetrable growth. These were mostly of black pine, planted some thirty years before by Balint’s father not, however, as standing timber to be felled later, but rather as decoration and cover for the deer. At their roots more lilac bushes had been placed and these too were now in full bloom beneath the rose-coloured trunks of the pines and the deep green, almost black sheen of the clusters of pine needles above. The pines too, seemed to be in bloom, for the tips of all their branches were covered with tiny dark-red embryonic cones, though these could only be distinguished from close at hand.
So magical and mysterious, so still and yet so full of resurgent life, did the meadow seem that Balint stopped for a moment to contemplate its mystery, and wonder at the fact that even the distances did not seem real and stable and fixed. The park seemed to have no end but to continue for ever into the distance as if it comprised the whole world and the whole world was the park of Denestornya and nothing else. As Balint stood there, motionless, rapt in a new sense of delight and exaltation, seven fallow deer appeared slowly from a group of pines. They were wading knee-high through the morning haze, two does with their fawns and three young females, and if they saw Balint they did not take any notice of him but just walked quietly and sedately on until, after a few moments, they disappeared again into the shadow of the trees. Their sudden appearance in the distance in front of him, and just as sudden disappearance a moment or two later contributed strongly to Balint’s sense of wonder and enchantment.
He pulled himself together and went on. And, suddenly, it seemed Adrienne were walking at his side.
He could almost see her, striding with long steps next to him, her head held high over her thin girlish neck and her dark hair fluttering around her face in a mass of unruly curls, just as he had seen her that time at Mezo-Varjas when together they had chased a runaway farmhorse. The image was so clear: Adrienne, walking beside him, holding herself very straight with her wide-open, topaz-coloured eyes looking unwaveringly ahead of her as she walked, silently and forever at his side …
Balint stopped abruptly, shaking his head to rid himself of her image and mentally shouting No! No! as if the words, even unspoken, could dispel her ghostly presence. Then, quickening his pace, he hurried towards the trees remembering that somewhere thereabouts was an ancient poplar, one of the most venerable of all the trees in the park, and that it stood on the edge of a small clearing. In a few moments he had found it. This king among trees was still alive; though one of its great side branches had fallen, presumably blown down in some April storm. Even so, the fallen branch was covered in sticky buds about to burst into leaf.
Balint went up to the tree, touched its bark as if saluting an old acquaintance. ‘So, my friend, you are still all right — even if they have roughed you up a bit!’ said Balint out loud as he sat down on the broken stump and looked around the little clearing.
This was where he had come when he had been allowed to ride beyond the limits of the lime allée. It was here that he would play at camping in the wild, dismounting and hitching the reins to the stub of a branch. Properly tethered, no rustler could steal his faithful steed. He would have liked to loosen the girth as well, for he knew that this was one of the first rules when resting during a trek, but at that time he hadn’t had the strength to do it by himself.
Balint sat there for a long time. All around him was infinite peace, and, strangely, for the air was alive with the song of birds, a feeling of infinite silence, the more tangible for the melodies that filled his ears. There seemed to be hundreds of different calls, of which he could distinguish only the si-si-si of the blackbirds, the chirping of the blue tits as they fluttered from branch to branch around him, the harsher notes of the golden orioles as they swooped low over the clearing with their distinctive swaying flight, the twittering of the sparrows that massed in the reed thickets by the river edge, and, through it all, the varied cries of shrikes as they perched on the trees’ branches watching for the insects or small lizards that would be their next meal. In the distance he could still hear the calls of the nightingales from the trees and shrubs nearer the castle, and all these sounds, so varied and yet so harmonious, somehow underlined and heightened the general sense of untouched virginal silence.
The trees had too many leaves, the thickets too many weeds; there were too many flowers in the grass and, as if nature could not contain its own richness, the air was filled with ethereal wisps of white fluff carrying the seeds from the almost invisible flowers of the poplar trees. High in the branches of the great poplar above Balint’s head a pair of wild doves started to coo and, to the young man below, the sound was the purest expression of love and happiness.
How wonderful it all is! How lovely! thought Balint as he surrendered himself totally to enjoying the richness and splendour around him. It was a pity no one else was there to see it, no one with whom he could share his own sense of euphoria. At once Adrienne’s face floated before him, saying: ‘What about me? I’m here! I’d understand!’